Sunday, May 27, 2012

NUGENT: Teach your children freedom isn’t free

Freedom isn’t free. Never has been, never will be. Very special warriors have provided freedom at supreme sacrifice since time immemorial. Good people will never forget, and we celebrate Memorial Day with a hard-charging spirit in appreciation for hard-charging warriors.

With his lifeblood pouring out of him from a mortal RPG wound to center mass, Pvt. 1st Class Todd Balding from Texas was, on the surface, but a bundle of red gauze and bandages, a jumble of tubes and numerous electronic apparatus beeping away. He was surrounded by a dedicated team of U.S. military medical experts at the Landstuhl hospital in Germany doing everything in their power to save the young American’s life.Toby Keith and I literally stood in the young hero’s blood and said a very solemn prayer. Moments later, Pvt. 1st Class Todd Balding died. He was 21 years-old. He died fighting for freedom. That was one of many defining moments that struck me deep inside during my USO tour in 2004, and a defining moment in my life.Toby and I were humbled beyond words to be allowed to join a presentation guard of warriors on the tarmac of the Iraq air base as we saluted a procession of flag-draped coffins being loaded onto a massive C-130 aircraft. Like our tears, the coffins just kept coming - and coming and coming and coming.
When I received the call, I immediately sent out an all-points bulletin to my management, staff and family to clear my schedule of all events. Within an hour, I had arranged a private plane, guitars and various electronic sound equipment. I had been requested to perform the national anthem and my song “Fred Bear” by Navy SEAL hero Chris Campbell in his will. How could I not honor his request. Regrettably, Chris Campbell’s dying request was thwarted by a politically correct bureaucrat, we believe by his commander in chief. On the night of his public memorial, all alone, I played the songs anyway in his honor in my home.
When I’m asked to play our national anthem I don’t just hit the notes and rush through the song so a game can be played or an event consummated. I play the song so it moves me. I play it the way Chris Campbell and all those amazing warriors in all those flag-draped coffins would want me to. I play it every night onstage when touring across the land to honor all those wonderful American warriors who paid the ultimate sacrifice so that you and I can live free and pursue our American dreams. On this Memorial Day, teach your children that freedom isn’t free.
Find the Memorial Day service at the Tomb of Unknowns on television and watch it with your children. Tell your children that many heroes have paid for their freedom with their lives. Remember U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Eric MacRae, who left behind a wife and children. Say a prayer for his family. Say a prayer for all the fallen warriors and the families they left behind.
There is no national holiday more revered in the Nugent household than Memorial Day. We live to celebrate Memorial Day every day. We will forever know that the ultimate sacrifices of these brave warriors have kept us free and the world a better, safer place. We know the American warrior has liberated more people from tyranny and evil in the history of the world than all other militaries and governments combined.
Tonight, I will play a blistering version of our national anthem as my family gathers to remember. I will play it like never before and dedicate it to Navy SEAL Chris Campbell and all those who gave all. May God eternally bless the American warriors who gave all. Happy Memorial Day, America. Never forget.

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |Who could not despise the tottering Bashar al-Assad dictatorship in Syria?
The Syrian strongman has killed some 10,000 protestors over the last year; thousands of Syrians are now refugees.
The autocracy arms and aids the terrorist organization Hezbollah. It targets democratic Israel with thousands of missiles, and still does its best to ruin neighboring Lebanon.
Theocratic and terrorist-sponsoring Iran has few allies -- but Syria remains its staunchest. Almost no country over the last half-century has proved more hostile to the United States than has Syria.
With sanctions not working, and with the Chinese, Iranians and Russians not eager to see Assad go, there is lots of talk that the United States and its allies must intervene to help the outmanned and outgunned Syrian opposition -- either with arms supplies, training for insurgent groups, or air cover.
At first glance, such a humanitarian intervention seems a good idea. A well-armed insurgency might fight its way to Damascus. Or we could bomb Assad out of power like we did Slobodan Milosevic from Serbia, or Muammar Gadhafi from Libya -- and without the use of ground troops or loss of American life.
Would not the spread of the Arab Spring to Damascus be wonderful -- especially given that it would weaken Iran and Shiite terrorist groups that have long killed Americans? Would not fewer die from collateral damage than from Assad's thugs?
But intervention, even if by air or through stealthy military assistance, requires some sort of strategy, and right now the United States does not seem to have any coherent one. We expected that post-Gadhafi Libya, and an Egypt without Hosni Mubarak, would be far better. They might be some day. But right now, emerging Islamic republics are hardly democratic. Some seem every bit as anti-American as were the dictatorships they replaced -- and could be even more intolerant of women, tribal minorities and Christians.
The point is not that we should only support idealists who promise an Arab version of Santa Monica, but that we do not oust one monster whom we are not responsible for only to empower one just as bad whom we would be responsible for.
Our three last interventions in the Middle East offer all sorts of different lessons, but one common theme predominates -- those whom we wished to help didn't seem to appreciate it. In Afghanistan, after a decade-long investment of blood and treasure, America is scheduled to withdraw in two years without any guarantee that Afghanistan won't be ruled by the Taliban, as it was in 2001. Our biggest problem seems to be our allied Afghan friends, who keep rioting and blowing up their American partners.
We successfully removed Saddam Hussein from Iraq. And by nobly staying on with thousands of troops, we defeated an insurgency and finally birthed a constitutional system in Iraq that is still viable -- but at a cost that the American public felt was not worth the eventual outcome.
In Libya, the model was to boast of United Nations approval, insert no ground troops, bomb Gadhafi, and support the insurgents. But because we far exceeded the very U.N. resolution we bragged about, we are not likely to get another such resolution for Syria. A bypassed Congress won't want to be snubbed again in favor of the U.N. And so far the Libyan air campaign has reminded us that if we do not send in ground troops and risk casualties, we have absolutely no influence on what follows.
Since we went into Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has borrowed more than $9 trillion and is currently running serial $1 trillion deficits. We no longer pay for our wars, but instead borrow the money from the Chinese and others who calculate how to profit better than we from the ensuing chaos.
After lots of interventions, we have learned one thing about loud Arab reformers, especially those who were educated at Western universities: They damn us for supporting their dictators; they damn us for removing them; they damn us for interfering in their affairs when we help promote democracy; and they damn us as callous when we just let them be.
These cautionary tales do not necessarily mean that we should not help the Syrian dissidents, only that we must ask ourselves who exactly are these guys, how much will it cost to see them win, and when it is over will our new friends rule any more humanely and competently than the monsters that we remove?
And one final consideration: If intervening in Syria is to be a humanitarian venture, why would saving lives there be any more important than saving far more lives from far more dictators in Africa?

When Barack Obama two years ago joked at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that potential suitors of his two daughters might have to deal with Predator drones (“But boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: Predator drones. You will never see it coming.”), the liberal crowd roared. That failed macabre joke would have earned George W. Bush a week of headline condemnation from the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Obama, in fact, has increased those judge/jury/executioner targeted assassinations tenfold during his tenure. But apparently, the combination of Obama’s postracial “cool” and the video-game nature of such airborne death — no CNN clips of charred torsos and smoldering legs, no prisoners with their ACLU lawyers in Guantanamo, no Seymour Hersh exposé on a Waziristan granny who was vaporized for being too near her terrorist-suspect grandson, no American losses for Code Pink and Moveon.org to demonstrate against — earned general exemption for that new liberal way of war. What bothered us about the Predator strikes in 2006–2008 was not the kills per se but the uncool nature of twangy Texan George Bush, who ordered them.
Last week 28-year-old, $17 billion–rich, jeans-clad Mark Zuckerberg took Wall Street for a multibillion-dollar ride, making his original buddies instant billionaires and his loyal larger circle millionaires. Note that there is no Occupy Wall Street protest at Facebook headquarters. Just as there are none at Oprah’s house or the residence of Leonardo DiCaprio, despite their take each year of between $50 and $100 million.
No one has suggested that Hollywood lower movie-ticket prices by asking Johnny Depp or Jennifer Lopez to walk away with $10 or $20 million less a year. Steve Jobs found ways to dodge taxes comparable to those deployed by any Wall Street fatcat, but he was iPad cool, and so his iPhone billions were exempt from the Occupy nonsense. Cool capitalists are immune from the neo-Marxist critique of capitalism — a racket that $40 billion–rich Warren Buffett learned late in life, but well enough, with the “Buffett Rule.”
We simply don’t mind that Google and Amazon rake in billions, but we despise Exxon and Archer Daniels Midland for doing the same. It is not that we need social networking and Internet searches more than food and fuel, but rather that we have the impression that cool zillionaires in flipflops are good while uncool ones in wingtips are quite bad.
I am sure that the tax lawyers who help Richard Branson and Mick Jagger are no less skilled at shorting the Treasury than those who work for Rush Limbaugh, but the profits of the former are okay while the latter’s are obscene. Limbaugh is a misogynist for using the word “slut” and apologizing for it; Bill Maher is a feminist for using slurs we cannot print and for which he did not apologize. One is uncool, the other very cool — as was a cynical and sarcastic David Letterman, who implied that the 14-year-old daughter of Sarah Palin had snuck into the Yankees’ dugout for quick sex with Alex Rodriquez.
The power of cool is evident also in politics. State quite correctly that you can see Russia from parts of Alaska, and you are ditzy white-trash Sarah from Wasilla; state falsely that Franklin Roosevelt addressed the nation on television in 1929, and you are just “good ol’ Joe Biden.”
John Kerry’s second married-into fortune probably dwarfs the one that Mitt Romney made himself, perhaps by a factor of ten. While we heard in 2012 that Romney wanted a car elevator in one of his many houses, we never heard much in 2004 of presidential candidate Kerry’s various mansions, boats, or assorted playthings, or how he proved to be a keen investor as a senator helping to set U.S. financial policy.
Kerry, you see, was cool. He windsurfed and wore spandex as he cycled, and found his exemption by championing the poor he rarely saw. The same was true of John Edwards of “Two Americas” fame. Do we now recall how he ran to the left of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, despite the $500 haircuts and the self-indulgent mansion, replete with “John’s room,” a hideaway with all sorts of adolescent toys? Edwards, remember, earned those spoils by charming juries in his smarmy style, and nearly destroyed the practice of obstetrics in North Carolina through his flurry of malpractice suits. No matter, Edwards was liberal, Kennedyesque, and cool — and he earned prophylaxis in the manner of JFK himself, of whose White House orgies we did not learn until a half-century later. Likewise we have been taught that there is no “power imbalance” or “insidious asymmetry” when a “mentor” has sexual relations with his young intern — as long as he is a feminist like Bill Clinton.
What, then, exactly, is this cool that allows you to earn whatever you like without censure, and then to spend it as you please without fear of public scorn?
It would seem that the disconnect is liberal politics, the coin by which one buys a sort of medieval indulgence from liberal gatekeepers in the media, academia, the arts, and the foundations that permits one to continue the pursuit and enjoyment of lucre and to indulge the baser appetites without harassment — in the manner that the medieval moneylender or sexual zealot still got to heaven by buying marble for the cash-strapped cathedral. That $20 billion–rich George Soros was a money speculator who almost destroyed the small depositors of the Bank of England and was convicted in France of insider trading matters not at all: Without his roulette-wheel billions we would not have Media Matters. Jon Corzine of MF Global cannot explain what he did with $1.2 billion of other people’s money. But there will never be a “Corzine Law.”
Who cares what George Clooney makes an hour, or how exactly his close friends can afford to pony up for a $40,000-a-plate dinner — when the takings will help Barack Obama feed the children? If Halliburton were wise, it would buy the shut-down Solyndra plant, make solar panels at a loss, and write the cost off as a lobbying and public-relations expense.
So cool is not obtained just through liberal politics. Images and intent are critical too. The stuffy tea-party crowd looks like the plain suburban guys and gals who sell us houses, cars, and insurance. And so, of course, they must be racist, even though their demonstrations give no proof of any such fetish. Their only oddity would seem to be a certain desire to ensure that they leave no litter in their wake for poorer custodians to clean up.
But Occupy Wall Street? That movement has produced thugs, thieves, rapists, would-be bombers, rioters, and street urchins who pollute their surroundings and cause mayhem. They act pre-modern but earn no scorn because they are cool – they sport a sort of elite grunge that suggests that the environmental-studies major at Brown empathizes with those poor for whom grime is not makeup.
Identity is key here. In general, to win exemption from the left-wing critique of America, the affluent must construct cool identities as far distant as possible from the white Christian heterosexual male, who is most culpable for creating our present affluence from ill-gotten gains. The multimillionaire Elizabeth Warren and her husband make nearly $1 million a year. They live in a home beyond the reach of 99 percent of America. And she may well have plagiarized and been dishonest about her own heritage. No matter — Warren washed away both her privilege and her sins by reinventing herself as a “Cherokee” who fights Wall Street oppressors.
So too Barack Obama. It was Obama himself, not the fringe Birthers, who first made the case that the president was born in Kenya — not because he was, but because to say now and then that he was added an exotic touch of cool to Barack Hussein Obama — a cool that a Barry Dunham born in Honolulu and prepped at Punahou would have lacked. Poor George Zimmerman — had he only called himself Jorge Zimmerman he might not have been written off as a “white Hispanic” vigilante.
Network news anchors anguished over whether George W. Bush had tried coke while thousands of African-Americans languished in jail for doing the same — but they snored when Barack Obama boasted that he had done that and much more. Push down a gay student fifty years ago as a teen, and if you are straitlaced Mitt Romney then you always were a homophobe; push away a little girl decades ago, and if you are Barack Hussein Obama, then you were struggling with identity and coming of age.
In short, millions of well-off Americans, from the entering college student to the full professor of law, from the billionaire thief to the president of the United States himself, endlessly chase cool.
And why would they not? Cool is now America’s holy grail that allows the elite and the rich not just to pursue and enjoy nice things, but to damn others who do the same.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

By John Hawkins

5/18/2012

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts." -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Conservatives and liberals may disagree on reasons, motivations, and excuses for Barack Obama's performance, but the facts are still facts. There may be many reasons that a pro football coach goes 1-15, but everyone can agree that his record is still 1-15, right? Well, here are some basic facts about how the country is faring with Barack Obama in the White House. Take a look at the numbers, sans commentary, and make your own judgment about whether Barack Obama deserves another term in office.
1) Real median household income is down $4300 since Obama took office.
2) The percentage of unemployed workers who've been out of a job for more than a year is over 30%.
3) The country has had the longest streak of +8% unemployment since the Depression under Obama: 39 months and counting.
4) In 2011 under Barack Obama, nearly one out of every seven Americans was on food stamps. That's a 70 percent increase from 2007.
5) Fifty percent of new college graduates are underemployed or unemployed.
6) U.S. home ownership is at a decade long low. So is the number of Americans who say their home is worth more than they paid for it. Home prices are the lowest they've been since 2002.
7) Barack Obama ended NASA's manned space program.
8) Going into this election cycle, Barack Obama had raised more money from Wall Street than any President in history. He has also raised more money from Wall Street than all of the GOP presidential contenders combined in this election cycle.
9) Under Barack Obama's leadership, the last time Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats passed a budget was April 9, 2009.
10) Barack Obama's budget was defeated 414-0 in the House and 99-0 in the Senate.
11) When he was running for President in 2008, Barack Obama pledged not to raise taxes on families making less than 250,000 dollars per year. He broke that promise with the tanning salon tax and with Obamacare, which raises almost 500 billion dollars in new taxes, a significant portion of which would be paid by people making less than 250,000 dollars per year.
12) When Barack Obama took office, gas was $1.95 per gallon. Today gas is $3.72 per gallon.
13) In February of this year, the federal government had a 229 billion dollar deficit. That was the largest deficit in the history of the United States.
14) America lost its AAA credit rating (which it had held since 1917) on Obama's watch despite the fact that Timothy Geithner publicly said there was "no risk" of that happening.
15) Barack Obama added more to the debt in just 38 months than George Bush did in two full terms as President.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

When two white newspaper reporters for the Virginian-Pilot were driving through Norfolk, and were set upon and beaten by a mob of young blacks — beaten so badly that they had to take a week off from work — that might sound like news that should have been reported, at least by their own newspaper. But it wasn’t.

The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News Channel was the first major television program to report this incident. Yet this story is not just a Norfolk story, either in what happened or in how the media and the authorities have tried to sweep it under the rug.
Similar episodes of unprovoked violence by young black gangs against white people chosen at random on beaches, in shopping malls, or in other public places have occurred in Philadelphia, New York, Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, Los Angeles, and other places across the country. Both the authorities and the media tend to try to sweep these episodes under the rug.
In Milwaukee, for example, an attack on whites at a public park a few years ago left many of the victims battered to the ground and bloody. But when the police arrived on the scene, it became clear that the authorities wanted to keep this quiet.
One 22-year-old woman, who had been robbed of her cell phone and debit card, and had blood streaming down her face, said, “About 20 of us stayed to give statements and make sure everyone was accounted for. The police wouldn’t listen to us, they wouldn’t take our names or statements. They told us to leave. It was completely infuriating.”
The police chief seemed determined to head off any suggestion that this was a racially motivated attack by saying that crime is color-blind. Officials elsewhere have said similar things.
A wave of such attacks in Chicago were reported, but not the race of the attackers or victims. Media outlets that do not report the race of people committing crimes nevertheless report racial disparities in imprisonment and write heated editorials blaming the criminal-justice system.
What the authorities and the media seem determined to suppress is that the hoodlum elements in many ghettoes launch coordinated attacks on whites in public places. If there is anything worse than a one-sided race war, it is a two-sided race war, especially when one of the races outnumbers the other several times over.
It may be understandable that some people want to head off such a catastrophe, either by not reporting the attacks in this race war, or by not identifying the race of those attacking, or by insisting that the attacks were not racially motivated — even when the attackers themselves voice anti-white invective as they laugh at their bleeding victims.
Trying to keep the lid on is understandable. But a lot of pressure can build up under that lid. If and when that pressure leads to an explosion of white backlash, things could be a lot worse than if the truth had come out earlier, and steps taken by both black and white leaders to deal with the hoodlums and with those who inflame them.
These latter would include not only race hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson but also lesser-known people in the media, in educational institutions, and elsewhere who hype grievances and make all the problems of blacks the fault of whites. Some of these people may think that they are doing blacks a favor. But it is no favor to anyone who lags behind to turn their energies from the task of improving and advancing themselves to the task of lashing out at others.
These others extend beyond whites. Asian-American schoolchildren in New York and Philadelphia have for years been beaten up by their black classmates. But people in the mainstream media who go ballistic if some kid says something unkind on the Internet about a homosexual classmate nevertheless hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil when Asian-American youngsters are victims of violence.
Those who automatically say that the social pathology of the ghetto is due to poverty, discrimination, and the like cannot explain why such pathology was far less prevalent in the 1950s, when poverty and discrimination were worse. But there were not nearly as many grievance mongers and race hustlers then.

Last week the Washington Post ran a piece on presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s high-school years, in which he supposedly was cruel to a shy, perhaps gay fellow student. The piece, mirabile dictu, appeared in the middle of the Biden-Obama reversal on gay marriage. Errors were spotted almost as soon as it was published, and the essay was summarily denounced as nonfactual by the family of the supposed victim of Romney’s supposed half-century-old callousness.

Of more interest was the reaction to the story. Aside from Romney’s gracious acknowledgment that he might have done something in his teens that he was not proud of (although he could not remember the Post’s hazing incident), and aside from the errors of fact pointed out in the Post story, apparent Romney supporters hit back hard — and in equally trivial fashion. If Romney was an insensitive preppie, well then, so was Obama — and for the matter, we had the punkish young Joe Biden. Almost immediately, all over the Internet, Obama’s own voice was heard reading from Dreams from My Father about his ancient drug use while in prep school, and about earlier unkind treatment of a middle-school girl chum. If high school is fair game in these doggy wars, then why not seventh and eighth grade?
For a year, we had heard from the liberal media the old tale of Seamus the dog, as a sort of Aesop’s fable warning about Mitt Romney’s innate cruelty. You see, on a family vacation, Romney in purportedly callous fashion put the family dog, Seamus, into a custom carrier on top of the family car. Forget about America borrowing $5 trillion in three years; worry instead about a dog on a car roof three decades ago.
But after yet another serial telling, suddenly the Romney supporters fought back: If Romney had confessed to putting the dog out like a masthead to the winds, Obama in his memoirs confessed to eating dogs! In short order, the Internet was flooded with Photoshopped images of cynophagia — as Obama munched on dachshund sandwiches and terrier burgers. I guess the point was that Americans would prefer putting Spot on top of the car to eating him.
The same trump had earlier happened with the “war against women.” Team Obama saw an opening with Rush Limbaugh’s crude “slut” putdown of Sandra Fluke — for which he later apologized — and attempted to inflate the slur as something emblematic of right-wing misogyny. But again it was not to be.
Limbaugh apologized; Limbaugh did not give money to the Romney campaign and indeed opposed his nomination in the primaries; and Limbaugh’s slur at least could be printed in family newspapers — in contrast to liberal Bill Maher’s. The latter’s profanity-laced and misogynistic sick rants against conservative women could not be quoted without dashes and asterisks. He never apologized. And he gave the Obama campaign $1 million in contributions. The desperate comeback of Democratic consultant Hilary Rosen that Ann Romney — a cancer and MS survivor and mother of five — had “never worked” (a point the odious Maher seconded) only made things worse, before this chapter of the doggy war was apparently called off by those who started it.
There have been more of these tit-for-tit, na-na na-na na-na doggy wars — with charges ranging from patrimonial polygamy to prep-school privilege — but you get the picture. So what can we learn from them, aside from the obvious fact that Barack Obama prefers not to talk about 40 months of 8 percent–plus unemployment, 1.7 percent GDP growth, $5 trillion in new debt, $4-a-gallon gas, and Obamacare?
Team Obama usually starts the exchange, either to distract from dismal economic news, or in zeal to portray Romney as aristocratic and out of touch — but without careful thinking about what the inevitable Romney rebuttal might look like.
The Romney people apparently will not run a repeat of McCain’s 2008 campaign, in which the candidate put such petty retaliation off limits. There will be no sanctimonious putdowns from Romney about dredging up Obama’s dog-eating past, in the manner in which McCain lectured his supporters about the inappropriateness of emphasizing the tripartite name Barack Hussein Obama — although Obama himself did, and would go on to focus on his middle name as proof of his multicultural resonance abroad. Just as Bill Clinton’s war room swore not to do a rerun of Mike Dukakis’s punching-bag 1988 campaign, so Romney apparently has determined not to repeat the McCain one-hand-tied-behind-the-back model.
In other words, each time we hear of an irrelevant hit on Romney, we will probably hear of something equally irrelevant — and worse — about Obama, in a way we never would have in 2008. Petty? A distraction from the failing economy? Of course, but the Romney people apparently believe that they must and will achieve deterrence by replying in kind and to such a degree that Team Obama will soon cease playing such a childish game of taunts.
But there is another, more interesting lesson from the doggy wars. These disclosures are supposed to emphasize the haughty, privileged upbringing and past of Mitt Romney: prep-school bully and homophobe, greedy financier, control-freak dad, and a thin happy-face veneer atop the vast hateful right-wing hit machine beneath. But, in truth, the contemporary Democratic party is no longer the old coalition of farmers, union workers, miners, and the lower middle class, but is run by the very wealthy. And so when the Post wished to emphasize Romney’s privileged prep school, did it not realize that Obama likewise went to a tony prep school? Does anyone believe hip left-wing Hollywood celebrities are less profane than talk-radio hosts? Does the present-day Democratic party not hinge on gift-giving from Wall Street, Hollywood, and academia? How can Obama supporters go after Bain Capital and yet hold their convention in Bank of America Stadium? Is Jon Corzine any less venal than was Ken Lay?
The tit-for-tat trivia wars were a bad idea for the Democrats in another sense as well. As we saw from the Republican primary campaign — especially the various hit pieces on the pasts of Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain — in today’s postmodern society of rampant drinking, womanizing, drug use, and shady financial deals, almost no one is above suspicion — but some are far less so than others. Liberals will mock Mormonism, but the doctrinaire avoidance of adultery, alcohol, tea, coffee, drugs, and nicotine is a political handler’s dream. In other words, to find run-of-the-mill dirt on Mitt Romney is going to be almost impossible, which explains why we are reduced to psychodramatic tales about a dog, Rush Limbaugh, and a 50-year-old regrettable prank.
Is the reverse true? Most incumbent presidents should have been fully vetted after nearly four years in office. But for a variety of obvious reasons, Barack Obama never was. He wrote two memoirs, one at a time when the impulse was to earn his advance through candor, not to offer the usual mush to protect a long-standing national political career. The result is that there are scads of things in Obama’s own first memoir (which now come over the Internet in his own voice) that were never cited in 2008, but most certainly can be in 2012.
After all, just because the media decided that they could destroy George W. Bush in 2000 with proof of a DUI or an admission of coke usage, or in 2004 with supposed lax attendance in the Texas Air National Guard, or Rick Perry in 2012 with graffiti on a rock, that does not mean that Obama’s exemption from commensurate scrutiny is always assured, especially since Obama himself has written about common drug use, drinking, and slothful attendance, and many of his earlier associates — Frank Marshall Davis, Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers, the Rev. James T. Meeks, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — were criminals or unhinged or sometimes both.
In sum, why would the Left try disreputable means to vet a mostly staid Mitt Romney, when Obama himself has bandied about a colorful past that could supply endless rebuttal and countercharges?
So can we at least hope to see an end to these stupid doggy stories? I doubt it.
Quite the opposite: We will probably hear leaks about an undisclosed Romney ailment — only to wonder why Obama, alone of major candidates in recent decades, has never released his medical records. We should expect to hear that Romney got a B or C in some college course — only to remind us that Obama, alone of major candidates, does not want anyone looking at his college transcripts. Do we really wish to hear how an admitted prep-school serial use of beer, marijuana, and occasional coke, and a history of skipped classes, translated into admission into Occidental and then Columbia? We will hear another 19th-century Romney family polygamy story only to be reminded of a 20th-century Obama counterpart. We will be lectured about a fiery Mormon bishop only to hear it trumped by another racist rant from Jeremiah Wright.
That so far the Obama campaign’s trivial pursuit has always backfired hardly suggests that it will stop — especially as the economy continues to sputter. For the true believers who run Obama’s campaign, their messianic leader could not possibly have feet of clay — and so they seem shocked each time they find yet another new way of letting the nation see that he does.

Recently, I was driving down pot-holed, two-lane, non-freeway 101 near Monterey (unchanged since the 1960s) when the radio blared that on a recent science test administered to public schools, California scored 47th in the nation. As I looked at the congested traffic on the decrepit highway and digested the idea that our public schools are competitive only with Mississippi and Alabama, I wondered — is that what we get for a more than 10 percent income tax, 10 percent state and local sales taxes, and the highest gas taxes in the nation?

To sum up why California has yet another deficit — this time a $16 billion whopper — is pretty easy: The number of demonized one-percenters who pay over 10 percent in their salary to the state has been shrinking, as thousands flee with their ideas, energy, business, and capital to nearby no-tax states, and others make less money due to more and more costs and regulations — while the number of those receiving all sorts of state housing, food, medical, education, and legal support is soaring. (In crude parlance, California increasingly is seen by some as a very bad deal, in terms of the sort of schools, safety, transportation, and housing per taxes paid in comparison to Reno, Tahoe, or Austin, but by far more people as a very good deal in comparison to the costs versus benefits in, for example, Oaxaca or El Salvador.)
In the last two decades, the number added to the prison rolls (ca. 115,000) was not that much smaller than the number of new tax-filers (150,000). And of the last 10 million added to the state’s population, 7 million are on Medicaid.
But California being California, such reductionist thinking is taboo, and we are not allowed to make any suggestion that there is a connection between fleeing entrepreneurs, massive and illegal influxes of undocumented foreign nationals in recent years, and record public salaries and unfunded pensions.
So that said, are there any out-of-the-box things California might do to save or make a few billion dollars, other than the obvious measures of slashing spending and dismantling burdensome regulations?1) Slap a user tax on the some $10–15 billion that is estimated to leave the state in remittances to foreign countries, or at least through executive action make foreign cash remittances grounds for disqualification from state public assistance.
2) Cancel high speed-rail asap.
3) Open up immediately the estimated now off-limits 35 billion barrels of oil off the central California coast, the vast majority of which can be safely and cleanly exploited by on-shore horizontal drilling.
4) Cap the amount one can receive from a California public pension, or multiple pensions at $100,000.
5) Eliminate three-quarters of the thousands of public California board members, who stymie commerce and are mostly costly and unproductive term-limited insider politicians.
6) Mandate one official language for state publications and office business.
7) Cut by 75 percent the number of administrators at the UC and CSU systems (their numbers from 1993 have grown by 212 percent), and pay them at the commensurate twelve-month faculty rate.
8) Clamp down on the vast underground and untaxed cash economy that has exploded to the point that one can buy tax-free almost anything needed, from a new lawn mower to a four-course meal, at roadside emporia and canteens.
9) Deport the 20,000 plus illegal-alien felons now in California state prisons to their countries of origin.
10) Have George Clooney do another $40,000 per head Hollywood fundraiser, but with Sacramento, not Barack Obama, as the beneficiary.

Despite the fact Barack Obama is married with two children, Newsweek magazine is dubbing him “The First Gay President” on its latest cover, crowning him with a rainbow-colored halo.
The cover comes in the wake of Obama’s newly declared support for homosexual marriage in America.

The edition, which hits newsstands Monday, features a column by Andrew Sullivan, an openly homosexual self-titled conservative political pundit.
“When you step back a little and assess the record of Obama on gay rights, you see, in fact, that this was not an aberration. It was an inevitable culmination of three years of work,” Sullivan said in a statement about his article.
“He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family,” he wrote, discussing similarities between the president and the homosexual community.
Obama’s declaration that he’s now backing same-sex marriages is the first time a sitting president has expressed such an opinion.
“It’s easy to write off President Obama’s announcement of his support for gay marriage as a political ploy during an election year. But don’t believe the cynics,” representatives from Newsweek told Politico.
Obama’s announcement came just days after Vice President Joe Biden indicated he was “absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and men and women marrying are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties.”
Newsweek has a history of controversial covers.
On Dec. 15, 2008, it featured a Holy Bible with a rainbow-colored bookmark, with an associated article titled, “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage.”
This week’s cover is prompting a lot of reaction online already.
“This is the best,” said Wilder Napalm of Louisville, Ky. “The left wing media is doing everything in their power to portray this as a good thing for Obama when in fact this is a disaster. He never had any intention of openly supporting gay marriage, if he did he would have done it long ago. But good old Joe stepped in it again. He left Obama no choice but to support gay unions or risk losing the support of the gay community. I’ll bet Obama could kill Biden about now.”
“I am surprised,” says John Wolf of St. Louis. “Newsweek has six subscribers? I dropped them when they made up stuff for Obama during the election.
And Larry in California noted: “Clinton was our first black president, according to author Toni Morrison. And Chris Matthews says we can’t vote Obama out because he’s our first black president. I’m confused. Is Obama our first black president, or our first gay president, or our first affirmative-action president?”

Friday, May 11, 2012

The campaign contour is pretty clear: The Obama reelection team will not make the case for the advantages and popularity of Obamacare, for the Chuian advantages of $4-a-gallon gas, for the dynamism of a 1.7 percent GDP growth rate, for the stimulatory effects of adding $5 trillion in new debt, or for why 8 percent unemployment does not qualify under the old rubric of a “jobless recovery.” Instead we are going to see a) mostly the spike-the-football sloganeering about Osama bin Laden and adherence to the Bush-Petraeus timetable in leaving Iraq, b) the supposed racism (Trayvon Martin–style), sexism (“war on women”) and homophobia of the Right, and c) personal attacks on Romney’s past.

But given that of almost all politicians, left and right, on the national scene, Romney is about the most squeaky clean (indeed, perhaps the squeakiest in a generation of candidates), the fare is going to be pretty paltry — mostly Mormon boilerplate and silly stuff like the Washington Post high-school bullying story that already is starting to unwind or fade.
The notable thing about these surrogate attacks is not just that they are trivial, beneath us, and distractions from a real debate over what to do about debt, joblessness, and the economy, but how quickly they are matched and trumped in equally trivial style. In the women wars, Sandra Fluke was rebutted by the unapologetic misogynist Bill Maher’s $1-million-dollar-gift to the Obama campaign; in the doggy wars, poor Seamus in his windy car-top cage was trumped by Obama’s cynophagia, and now Romney the prep-school purported hair-cutter is seen and raised in Na-na na-na na-na style with Obama the Hawaii preppie stoner, who likewise had been insensitive early in his school days, in his case by pushing a middle-school girl. In other words, the Romney support group is not, in high-minded McCain fashion, going to avoid the silly, trivial, and irrelevant, as was true in 2008. And given that Obama’s past has never really been vetted, at some point I think these Washington Post–like stories will cease, given the inevitable trump to follow. In other words, I don’t think we are going to be reading stories about anything like Romney getting a B- in math in college, or not telling us that on his released medical report that he might have had asthma, or that as a Bain CEO he didn’t publish an annual report, and for obvious reasons . . .

Monday, May 7, 2012

Pat Buchanan looks at Obama's 'end zone dance' in Afghanistan

“My fellow Americans, we have traveled through more than a decade under the dark cloud of war,” said Barack Obama from Bagram Air Base.
“Here in the predawn darkness, we can see the light of a new day on the horizon. The Iraq War is over. The number of troops in harm’s way has been cut in half, and more will be coming home. … The time of war began in Afghanistan, and this is where it will end.”
Interesting comment, that last.
If “the time of war” is at an end, does that rule out U.S. military action in Syria or war on Iran?
Setting aside the 14,000-mile round trip to Afghanistan to do an end zone dance on the anniversary of Seal Team Six’s dispatch of Osama bin Laden, Obama seems to have boxed in his Republican rivals.
His assurance that our wars are ending and our troops are coming home reflects the national will. And his partnership agreement with President Hamid Karzai and pledge that a U.S. force will remain to train the Afghan army and prevent al-Qaida’s return inoculates him against the charge that he is cutting and running.
Yet the New York Times was disappointed.
Obama had not said how the United States is to train the Afghan army to defeat the Taliban by 2014, nor how we can get Karzai to deal with the pervasive corruption and incompetence of his government.
Nor did Obama say how we can be certain al-Qaida will not return when we depart.
The Times misses the point.
This speech was not designed to lay out a U.S. strategy for the next 12 years, but to get Barack Obama past the post in November.
And for that objective, the speech works.
No one knows what will happen when 23,000 more U.S. troops come home by Sept. 30, and all combat troops are out in 2014. The odds are that, after a “decent interval,” like the one in Vietnam from 1973 to 1975, the Taliban will return to take vengeance on all who abandoned them, and Afghanistan will come again to resemble the land we invaded a decade ago.
Why is this probable?
First, because the Taliban have shown themselves to be, though fewer in number, a superior fighting force to the Afghan army. They have not needed foreigners to motivate, train, advise or lead them.
Nor have they needed foreign money to fight. Yet they have battled the best army in the world for a decade and repeatedly sacrificed their lives in suicide attacks.
How many Afghans on our side have launched suicide attacks?
Second, the Taliban are rooted in the Pashtun, the largest tribal group in Afghanistan, which constitutes half the population and is concentrated in the crucial south and east.
Third, they have a secure sanctuary in Pakistan.
Fourth, because, as we saw with the hysterical reaction to what U.S. troops thought was the routine burning of desecrated Qurans, Islam is the most powerful cultural and social force in the country. And the Taliban are the most deeply rooted in that faith.
Fifth, because nationalism is the most potent political current roiling nations from the Maghreb to Middle East to South Asia. And the Taliban have the causalities and credentials to prove they will fight forever to free their country of foreign influence.
A majority of Afghans surely wish the Taliban would not return, given the savagery of their previous rule and the desire of the Afghan people to be free to live their own lives according to their own interpretation of their faith.
Yet the Taliban have shown themselves willing to persist against huge odds, to fight and die in considerable numbers for the kind of country they wish to live in – and the kind of regime they wish to live under.
Our allies have not remotely matched their zeal.
“A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history,” said Mohandas Gandhi.
So, after a decade of war in Afghanistan, what have we accomplished, and at what cost? Some 2,000 U.S. dead, 16,000 wounded, hundreds of billions sunk, scores of thousands of Afghan dead. Al-Qaida was driven out a decade ago but is now in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, North Africa and Iraq.
The Taliban are gone from Kabul but may be coming back. And our hope of preserving what success we have had rests with Hamid Karzai.
“America has no designs beyond an end to al-Qaida safe havens,” said Obama in Bagram. “Our goal is not to build a country in America’s image, or to eradicate every vestige of the Taliban.”
But if those are our goals, had we not achieved them all by early 2002? What, then, were we fighting for – these 10 years?
If we had to do it all over again, would we?
The nation now seems not to think so. And the nation is right.

1. Obama and unrepentant terrorist William Ayers misappropriated over 300 million dollars in donations meant for the education of Chicago’s minority students. They routed the money to Obama’s community activist buddies who then tried to turn the students in radicals. The program was a total failure.

2. Obama, as an Illinois State Senator, redirected tens of millions in Illinois tax dollars to Valerie Jarrett and Tony Rezko, to provide housing for low income families. They returned the favor with political donations. The housing units were built with cheap materials and labor and are uninhabitable after a mere 10 years of use.

3. Obama accepted millions in illegal campaign contributions from foreign credit cards after the credit card filters used to screen out foreign money, was switched off. This also allowed domestic donors, who were over the legal limit, to contribute more.

4. Obama and SecState Clinton’s efforts to bring the US under the UN’s Small Arms Treaty are direct violations of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.

5. Obama attempted to move control of the Census Bureau from the Commerce Department to the White House, to be managed by then Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel.

6. Obama had provided under the radar amnesty to illegal immigrants by allowing ICE Director John Morton to prohibit ICE officers from enforcing US immigration laws.

7. Obama allowed USAG Holder to ignore the violation of US immigration laws in the sanctuary cities, i.e.,San Francisco, etc.

8. Obama has failed to defend US soil in Arizona as Mexican troops bring illegals and drugs into the USA, crossing the border doing so. This is a direct violation of Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution.

10. Obama is in contempt of Federal court for his illegal oil drilling moratorium in the Gulf.

11. Obama spent a month as the UN Security Council Chair in 2009, which raises the question of his conflict of interest between the US and the UN. This is also likely a violation of his Oath of Office as the UN conflicts with our Constitution on many levels, i.e., LOST, UN Small Arms ban, etc.

12. Obama signed an EO in December 2009 that allows Interpol to operate in the US without oversight by Congress, courts, FBI, or local law enforcement.

13. Obama and SecState Clinton misappropriated, er, used $23 million in US taxpayer funds to help Obama’s homeland of Kenya move to a communist nation where the freedom of speech, private property rights, and other rights are subservient to “social justice”. This includes the fact that the Kenyan constitution adopted Sharia Law, which violates the basic human rights of women.

14. Obama was likely involved with then Governor Rod Blagojevich to try and sell his Illinois Senate seat, i.e., pay to play. Jesse Jackson Jr is under investigation for it and it appears that Valerie Jarrett might also have been involved.

15. Obama ran a website that asked Americans to report on other Americans, in the area of ObamaKare, using whitehouse.gov and taxpayer money to do so. He repeated this with AttackWatch.

16. Obama got onto the Indiana ballot through voter fraud in 2008.

17. Obama sealed all of his records that would show that he is possibly an illegal president, that he is feloniously using a false SSN, that his draft registration number is false, that his Fulbright award was falsely awarded as Obama claimed foreign student status, and that his student aid was falsely obtained.

18. Obama violated the Constitution by firing the GM CEO.

19. Obama violated bankruptcy laws by forcing GM bondholders to accept millions of dollars in losses of money that they were legally entitled to.

20. Obama violated bankruptcy laws by awarding the UAW with a share of GM and Chrysler during their bankruptcy proceedings.

21. Obama bought votes for ObamaKare with acts like, “Cornhusker Kickback”, “Louisiana Purchase” and the DoI increasing water allocations toCalifornia’sCentral Valley. This brought in the votes of Dennis Cardoza and Jim Costa, both Democrat holdouts.

22. Obama lied about Americans being able to keep their healthcare coverage if they wanted to. ObamaKare is already forcing them out of their current coverage.

23. Obama attempted to bribe Joe Sestak with a job offer in order to get him to drop out of the Senate race against Arlen Specter.

24. Obama bypassed Congress and told the EPA to set carbon emission standards.

25. Obama forced BP to pony up a $20 billion slush fund to compensate Gulf Coast businesses and residents affected by the BP oil spill. It was administered by one of Obama’s political appointees and there is NO Congressional oversight.

26. Obama did nothing to Holder (abetted a felony) when Holder refused to prosecute two New Black Panther Party members for brandishing weapons in front of a voting location in Filthadelphia. A direct violation of the voters Civil Rights.

28. Obama bypassed the Senate with many of his appointments of over 30 “czars.”

29. Obama illegally fired Sherry Sherrod from the USDA over remarks she made at an NAACP meeting in March 2010. He violated her due process.

30. Obama violated contractual law when his regime cancelled 77 oil field development contracts previously approved by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, under Bush 43’s administration. This keeps us from extracting from 2-3 TRILLION barrels of oil.

31. Obama used the DHS to determine the political affiliation of Americans making FOIA requests about the Regime. This led to requests being stalled, lost, etc.

32. Obama instigated a revolution in Egypt against an ally in the War on Terror.

33. Obama violated the War Powers Act of 1973 by conducting a war against Libya without Congressional authorization.

34. Obama lied to the American people when he said that there were no US troops on the ground in Libya and then later said they were only “logistical troops.”

35. Obama acted in April 2009, at the G20 meeting, to expand the Special Drawing Rights, that now gives the IMF more control over the US economy.

39. Obama issued an EO on July 12, 2011, attempting to restrict the Second Amendment rights of US citizens in Texas, California, New Mexico and Arizona.

40. Obama’s allowed the FCC to assume authority over the internet, in direct violation of a federal appeals court that DENIED the commission that authority. In December, the FCC voted and passed the first federal regulations on internet traffic.

46. Obama deprived the due process of two U.S.citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, by assassinating them via a CIA drone attack in Yemen on Sept. 30, 2011. This also raises the question of an act of war against Yemen for firing into a sovereign nation. Obama said in 2008: “No. I reject the Bush Administration’s claim that the President has plenary authority under the U.S. Constitution to detainU.S.citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants.”

47. Obama allowed Education Secretary Arne Duncan to grant waivers to No Child Left Behind however, this is a law enacted by Congress and neither Obama nor Duncan have the authority to authorize that.

48. Obama allowed the bailouts to grant money without the authority to do so. “No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.” Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7U.S.Constitution

49. Obama allowed Operation Castaway to occur, which allowed firearms laws to be broken through coercion of legal gun dealers.

50. Obama allowed Operation Fast and Furious to occur, which allowed hundreds of Mexican nationals and Border Agent Brian Terry to be murdered with illegal arms given out by the ATF and DOJ.

51. Obama bypassed the Senate to appoint three people to the National Labor Relations Board. (Naturally, they’ll all be Obomobots) Violates policy.

52. Asks Permission from the UN in order for us to go to war.

53. Consults with UN on his concerns of "allowing voter fraud" by NO I.D. at the time of voting.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

The human capacity for self-delusion truly is remarkable. Most people out there end up believing exactly what they want to believe even when the truth is staring them right in the face. Take the U.S. economy for example. Barack Obama wants to believe that his policies have worked and that the U.S. economy is improving. So that is what he is telling the American people. The mainstream media wants to believe that Barack Obama is a good president and that his policies make sense and so they are reporting that we are experiencing an economic recovery. A very large segment of the U.S. population still fully supports Barack Obama and they want to believe that the economy is getting better so they are buying the propaganda that the mainstream media is feeding them.

But is the U.S. economy really improving? The truth is that it is not. The rate of employment among working age Americans is exactly where it was two years ago and household incomes have actually gone down while Obama has been president. Home ownership levels and home prices continue to decline. Meanwhile, food and gasoline continue to become even more expensive. The percentage of Americans that are dependent on the government is at an all-time record high and the U.S. national debt has risen by more than 5 trillion dollars under Obama. We simply have not seen the type of economic recovery that we have seen after every other economic recession since World War II.

The horrible statistics about the U.S. economy that you are about to read are not talked about much by the mainstream media. They would rather be “positive” and “upbeat” about the direction that things are headed.But lying to the American people is not going to help them. If you are speeding in a car toward a 500 foot cliff, you don’t need someone to cheer you on. Instead, you need someone to slam on the brakes.

The cold, hard reality of the matter is that the U.S. economy is in far worse shape than it was four or five years ago.We have never come close to recovering from the last recession and another one will be here soon.

The following are 25 horrible statistics about the U.S. economy that Barack Obama does not want you to know….#1 The percentage of Americans that own homes is dropping rapidly. According to Gallup, the current level of homeownership in the United States is the lowest that Gallup has ever measured.#2 Home prices in the U.S. continue to fall like a rock as well. They have declined for six months in a row and are now down a total of 35 percent from the peak of the housing bubble. The last time that home prices in the United States were this low was back in 2002.#3 Last year, an astounding 53 percent of all U.S. college graduates under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed.#4 Back in 2007, about 10 percent of all unemployed Americans had been out of work for 52 weeks or longer. Today, that number is above 30 percent.#5 When Barack Obama first became president, the number of “long-term unemployed workers” in the United States was 2.6 million. Today, it is 5.3 million.#6 The average duration of unemployment in the United States is about three times as long as it was back in the year 2000.#7 Despite what the mainstream media would have us to believe, the truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that are employed is not increasing. Back in March 2010, 58.5 percent of all working age Americans were employed. In March 2011, 58.5 percent of all working age Americans were employed. In March 2012, 58.5 percent of all working age Americans were employed. So how can Barack Obama and the mainstream media claim that the employment situation in the United States is getting better? The employment rate is still essentially exactly where it was when the last recession supposedly ended.#8 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.#9 In 1962, 28 percent of all jobs in America were manufacturing jobs. In 2011, only 9 percent of all jobs in America were manufacturing jobs.#10 In some areas of Detroit, Michigan you can buy a three bedroom home for just $500.#11 According to one recent survey, approximately one-third of all Americans are not paying their bills on time at this point.#12 Since Barack Obama entered the White House, the price of gasoline has risen by more than 100 percent.#13 The student loan debt bubble continues to expand at a very frightening pace. Recently it was announced that total student loan debt in the United States has passed the one trillion dollar mark.#14 Incredibly, one out of every four jobs in the United States pays $10 an hour or less at this point.#15 Household incomes all over the United States continue to fall. After adjusting for inflation, median household income in America has declined by 7.8 percent since December 2007.#16 Over the past several decades, government dependence has risen to unprecedented heights in the United States. The following is how I described the explosive growth of social welfare benefits in one recent article….

Back in 1960, social welfare benefits made up approximately 10 percent of all salaries and wages. In the year 2000, social welfare benefits made up approximately 21 percent of all salaries and wages. Today, social welfare benefits make up approximately 35 percent of all salaries and wages.

#17 In November 2008, 30.8 million Americans were on food stamps. Today, more than 46 millionAmericans are on food stamps.#18 Right now, more than 25 percent of all American children are on food stamps.#19 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, today 49 percent of all Americans live in a home that receives some form of benefits from the federal government.#20 Over the next 75 years, Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars. That comes to $328,404 for each and every household in the United States.#21 During the first quarter of 2012, U.S. public debt rose by 359.1 billion dollars. U.S. GDP only rose by 142.4 billion dollars.#22 At this point, the U.S. national debt is rising by more than 2 million dollars every single minute.#23 The U.S. national debt has risen by more than 5 trillion dollars since the day that Barack Obama first took office. In a little more than 3 years Obama has added more to the national debt than the first 41 presidents combined.#24 The Federal Reserve bought up approximately 61 percent of all government debt issued by the U.S. Treasury Department during 2011.#25 The Federal Reserve continues to systematically destroy the value of the U.S. dollar. Since 1970, the U.S. dollar has lost more than 83 percent of its value.But the horrible economic statistics only tell part of the story.In communities all over America there is a feeling that something fundamental has changed. Businesses that have been around for generations are shutting their doors and there is a lot of fear in the air. The following is a brief excerpt from a recent interview with Richard Yamarone, the senior economist at Bloomberg Brief….

You have to listen to what the small businesses are telling you and right now they are telling you, ‘Hey, I’m the head of a 3rd or 4th generation, 75 or 100 year old business, and I’ve got to shut the doors’ or ‘I’ve got to let people go. And if I’m hiring anybody back, it’s only on a temporary basis.’Sometimes they do this through a hiring firm so that they can sidestep paying unemployment benefit insurance. So that’s what’s really going on at the grassroots level of the economy. Very, very, grossly different from what you’re seeing in some of these numbers coming out in earnings releases.”

All over the country, millions of hard working Americans are desperately looking for work. They have been told that “the recession is over”, but they are still finding it incredibly difficult to find anyone that will hire them. The following example is from a recent CNN article….

Joann Cotton, a 54-year-old Columbus, Mississippi, resident, was one of those faces of poverty we met on the tour. Unemployed for three years, Joann has gone from making “$60,000 a year to less than $15,000 overnight.” Her husband is disabled and dependent on medicines the couple can no longer afford. They rely on food stamps, which, Joann says, “is depressing as hell.”Receiving government aid, however, has not been as depressing as her job search. Joann says she has applied for at least 300 jobs. Even though she can barely afford gas, she drives to the interviews only to learn that the employers want to hire younger candidates at low wages.The experiences have taken a toll: “I’ve aged 10 years in the three years that I’ve been looking for a job,” Joann told us. “I want to get a job so I can just relax and exhale … but I can’t. After a while you just give up.”

Meanwhile, Barack Obama and his family continue to live the high life at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer.Even many Democrats are starting to get very upset about this. The following is from a recent article by Paul Bedard….

Blue collar Democratic voters, stuck taking depressing “staycations” because they can’t afford gas and hotels, are resentful of the first family’s 17 lavish vacations around the world and don’t want their tax dollars paying for the Obamas’ holidays, according to a new analysis of swing voters.

It simply is not appropriate for the Obamas to be spending millions upon millions upon millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars on luxury vacations when so many Americans are deeply suffering.But Barack Obama does not want you to know about any of this stuff.He just wants you to buy his empty propaganda one more time so that he can continue to occupy the White House for another four years.